A WITH BOTH HANDS MINI-REVIEW

Whenever I watch or read something about zombies these days, I always pay heed to the warning of my friend John Reilly who warned me that zombies have no valuable metaphysical significance. Werewolves are tragic, and vampires have pathos, because they retain their humanity through their transformation, but zombies are just meat puppets. Nothing good will come of the current obsession with them, he warned me.

I know, but I like the genre just the same. It is perhaps something of the temper of the times that the intersection of millennialism, the germ theory of disease, and inchoately materialist metaphysics should coincide to create the zombie movie. The genre has moved quickly of late. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, but remained a cult classic until the mainstream movies of 2002, Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. Now we have a mainstream zombie parody.

I found Zombieland hilarious. I hadn't really expected a zombie movie to be funny, but there you have it. Dark humor, of course, and mostly by way of reference to the genre itself. I wonder whether it is quite as funny to those who haven't see all the terrible movies that preceded this one. These zombies are really more comical than menacing, but that is just fine.

Nonetheless, a good movie, and perhaps worth seeing even, or especially, by those who are not zombie fans.